Comment by fsloth
8 hours ago
The CPU on most machines is quite proprietary. I don’t understand this faux purity dogma.
Practical computing is not and never has been an abstract pure concept. It’s about making machines built by corporations to do usefull things at scale.
There is no ”non proprietary” computing unless you make your own stack.
Yes but there are business costs to using high-level proprietary tools and libraries. If you write your app using win32, you won’t be able to port is very easily. You’re also stuck with whatever bad or bizarre decisions Microsoft made.
It’s even worse for CUDA. GPUs are expensive, and now you’re vendor locked. You’re between a rock and a hard place. Either spend millions in engineering time, or millions on price-gauged hardware.
” If you write your app using win32, you won’t be able to port is very easily.”
This is wrong way around.
If you don’t support the platform your app runs on using the native api:s to the hilt your port is just bad.
If you actually want to support multiple platforms _you actually need to support_ them from the ground up.
This is speaking industrially and businesswise. A professional software business always has per-platform implementation resources. Or they have just one platform. Or they pretend they are multiplatform and then _everybody_ _daily_ fights with the problems this causes.
Obviously those elements that can be portable should be. It’s like Einsteins simplicity maxim - your codebase should be as portable as can be but not more.
” It’s even worse for CUDA…”
No these are just the business and market constraints. If this does not make sense for your offering then don’t use it. This feels like false FOMO - CUDA is not a silver bullet but it might be a specific solution to a specific problem.
Win32 is the most stable abi on the Linux desktop.
Dead wrong. Win32 (externally) only seems stable, but internally it changes between Windows releases. Win7 syscalls are completely different from Win11 syscalls, meaning if I want to release a binary _without relying_ on Win32 I need to provide full syscall mappings _for each and every Windows version_. This doesn't happen on Linux.
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I wonder which APIs you would use to port easily, because POSIX and Khronos aren't it either, as they are industry standards driven by companies where one has to pay for a seat at Open Group and Khronos offices.
There is no ”easy” porting.
Once this is accepted the rest becomes easier as you are not wasting time trying to find a silver bullet.
I mean it’s then ”just normal work”.
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> If you write your app using win32, you won’t be able to port is very easily.
Is this still true? eg, Shopify saying porting is now easy so no need for abstractions.
Porting has never been hard. Just follow the platform guidelines. Make sane architecture. Done.
I mean _it's just work_. You don't need to invent anything. Just do the work.
What _is_ hard is when people run after silver bullets to avoid all this work.
Because people who don't understand software decide it would be cheaper to implement something only once. Or someone who does not really understand what they are doing insists that same C++ code runs automatically on all platforms.
AI has given the software engineers permit from the beancounters to do the sane thing.
Good software development orgs _have always_ done proper per platform ports.
Also - there is nothing wrong in supporting only one platform as such!
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